Squarespace vs. Wix vs. a Custom-Coded Website: Which Is Right for Your Business?
A plain comparison of the two best-known website builders and a custom-coded site, on cost, speed, design, ownership and who makes the changes.
If you’re setting up a website for your business, three options come up again and again: Squarespace, Wix, or paying someone to build a site in custom code. Each one suits some businesses better than others.
A note before we start: we build custom-coded websites, and we don’t use Wix, Squarespace or templates. We’ve tried to be fair anyway, and there are businesses we’d point toward a builder.
What each one is
Squarespace is a website builder known for polished, well-designed templates. You pick a template, swap in your text and photos, and pay a monthly or yearly plan that includes hosting.
Wix is a website builder with a drag-and-drop editor. You can place almost anything anywhere on the page, and a large app market adds booking, stores, forms and more. It’s also paid by a monthly or yearly plan.
A custom-coded website is designed and built for your business by a person or studio, written in code rather than assembled in a builder. You pay for the design and build, the site belongs to you, and it can be hosted almost anywhere.
Up-front cost and ongoing cost
Builders are cheap to start. You can have something online in an afternoon for the price of a plan. The cost continues every month or year for as long as the site is online, and apps, extra features and higher plans add to it. Check each builder’s current pricing page, since plans and prices change.
A custom site costs more at the start, because someone is designing and writing it for you. After that, the running costs are usually small: hosting, your domain, and changes when you need them, either done yourself or through a maintenance plan.
Over two or three years, the gap between the two is often smaller than the first invoice suggests. Add up the full period before you decide.
Speed
Builders load a lot of shared code to support every possible feature, even the ones you don’t use. Wix sites in particular can feel slow once several apps are added.
A custom site only includes what your pages need, so it can be very fast. Speed matters to visitors, who leave slow sites, and it’s one of the things search engines look at.
Design
Squarespace templates look good out of the box, and many businesses use the same few. Your site can end up looking like a lot of other sites.
Wix gives you freedom to move things around, which is great if you have a good eye and bad if you don’t. It’s easy to end up with a page that looks fine on a laptop and crowded on a phone.
A custom site is designed around your business, your customers and your content from the start, including how it looks on a phone.
Who owns it, and whether you can leave
This is the difference people notice last and regret most.
On a builder, you’re renting. If you stop paying, the site goes offline. Moving to another service is hard: a Wix site can’t be exported and moved elsewhere, and Squarespace only exports some of your content. In practice, leaving usually means rebuilding.
A custom-coded site is files you own. You can move it to another host or hand it to another developer, and it keeps working.
Who makes the changes
On a builder, you can log in and change things yourself, which is a real advantage if you like doing it and have the time.
With a custom site, changes usually go through the person who built it, unless you’re comfortable editing code. That’s why many studios, including ours, offer a monthly maintenance plan. You send the change, and someone else makes it.
Search engines
All three can handle the basics: page titles, descriptions, headings and a sitemap. Where custom sites tend to do better is speed and clean, simple code, both of which help. No platform guarantees a place at the top of Google. Good content, accurate business details and a site people actually use matter more than the tool it’s built with.
Which one should you pick
A builder may be right if your budget is very small, you enjoy doing things yourself, you have the time to learn the tool, and a template look is fine for your business.
A custom site may be right if you want it done for you, words included, you want it to look like your business and nobody else’s, you care about speed, and you want to own what you pay for.
If you’re weighing a custom site, our pricing page shows exactly what it costs: $2,000 for every page you need, with the writing included. And if you want to talk it through, tell us about your business.